Stacey Abrams delivers response from Democrats.
WASHINGTON — Stacey Abrams used the biggest speech of her political career Tuesday to shine the light on Georgia-style bipartisanship and slam President Donald Trump and his Republican allies for a federal shutdown “disgrace” that devastated American families.
Abrams laced the Democratic rebuttal to the State of the Union with calls for political leaders to embrace a vision that offers struggling families a chance at middle-class prosperity, saying that “hopes are being crushed by Republican leadership that ignores real life or just doesn’t understand.”
And the former gubernatorial candidate said she was outraged after joining a group of volunteers in Georgia a few weeks ago to help distribute meals to furloughed workers who needed financial help amid the 35-day federal shutdown, which ended after Trump relented on a demand for funding for a wall on the U.S. border.
“Making their livelihoods a pawn for political games is a disgrace,” she said. “The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the president of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people — but our values.”
Presenting a contrast to Washington’s gridlock, Abrams touted Georgia as a sterling example of how to work across the aisle. She spoke of allying with Gov. Nathan Deal and other GOP leaders while she was the state House’s top Democrat to pass a criminal justice overhaul and infrastructure improvements.
“The leaders of our state didn’t shut down — we came together. And we kept our word,” she said.
“It should be no different in our nation’s capital,” Abrams said. “We may come from different sides of the political aisle, but our joint commitment to the ideals of this nation cannot be negotiable.”
But she said none of those ambitions can be possible without guaranteeing “the bedrock of our right to vote” — reinforcing her demand to expand ballot access after a race for governor clouded by long lines at polling sites and criticism of the cancellation hundreds of thousands of “inactive” voters.
“Let’s be clear: Voter suppression is real,” she said. “From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving and closing polling places to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.”
The first black woman to deliver the rebuttal, Abrams was awarded the assignment less than three months after her narrow defeat to Republican Brian Kemp in the race for governor.